The leadership of the Independent National Electoral Commission in Kwara has announced that a total of 373 candidates will be involved in the governorship and House of Assembly elections on Saturday. However, the commission has decided that some collation officers will be moved away from the state ahead of the elections.
The update was made known to the public at a press briefing by INEC’s Resident Electoral Commissioner in the state, Garba Madami.
Garba explained that a total of 35 candidates would take part in the gubernatorial polls, while the remaining 338 candidates who are spread among 19 parties in the state, would contest for the 24 seats in Kwara’s House of Assembly.
During the briefing, Garba spoke about his displeasure on the performance and attitudes of some collation officers that participated in the last presidential election that took place on 23rd of February. As a result, they would not be included in the list of those that would function as collation officers on Saturday.
Garba stressed that the highlight of their shortcomings was during the calculation of votes.
Reiterating his position on the attitudes displayed by collation officers, Garba said, “A lot of the collation officers did not do well. In fact, we are dropping a lot of collation officers.
“We discovered that those in sciences do better in collation than those that read humanities.
“We have more problems with those collation officers that read humanities may be it is because they don’t like Mathematics.”
He further mentioned that supplementary training would be carried out for ad hoc staff in the state prior to the upcoming election. Garba added that 12,409 ad-hoc staff would partake in it.
He subsequently informed the audience that the commission had already distributed all sensitive materials to each local government in the state.
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